Back in 2005, when Paul Martin was trying to get ahead of the sponsorship scandal, the Liberals needed to show they were careful stewards of public money, so they decided to fix the Public Works and Government Services Department, which is in charge of inefficiently buying about $20-billion of goods and services every year.

When a civil servant needs a stapler, she must fill out a form, which is processed by other civil servants, who follow rules designed to ensure that the government isn’t ripped off and that everybody has a fair chance at selling staplers.

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As a result, government pays a lot more for staplers than you would think is possible. The same is true for real estate. Governments are lousy landlords, partly because they aren’t very good at managing the revenue-generating retail developments on the first couple of floors of most office buildings.

To fix this, the Liberals brought in a couple of heavy hitters from Bay Street, paid them each $330,000 a year, and asked them to draw up a plan to save $2.5 billion over five years.

The idea was to centralize purchasing, create an electronic process, sort of like eBay in reverse, where suppliers could bid on stapler contracts, and everyone could forget about filling out forms, and taxpayers would save a bundle.

When the Conservatives won the 2006 election, Stephen Harper put high-flying Montreal businessman Michael Fortier in the Senate and made him public works minister. Fortier liked the proposed reforms, and in the departmental plan for the 2006-07, the Conservatives took ownership of the $2.5 billion in savings.

The Bay Street guys — David Rotor and Douglas Tipple — met repeatedly with Fortier, deputy minister David Marshall, then-treasury board president John Baird, and Wayne Wouters, who was then Baird’s deputy and is now the clerk of the Privy Council. Everything seemed to be going fine.

But senior public servants can be subtle and treacherous, and these reforms were threatening their turf. Ottawa-based stapler salesmen started screaming.

In June 2006, Rotor and Tipple flew to London to meet with British civil servants. Several meetings did not happen as planned, the result of scheduling cock-ups beyond the control of Rotor and Tipple.

But Canadian officials did a report on the trip, laying the blame on Rotor and Tipple, which someone leaked to The Globe and Mail.

The Globe, naturally enough, put the story on the front page. Another report, which cleared the two men, was not released, and the department wouldn’t let Rotor or Tipple speak.

Politicians like to let on that they don’t care what’s in the papers, but they do.

When the story broke, Fortier’s chief of staff, Frederic Loiselle, emailed the minister, warning of the fallout: “I think it’s the kind of story that will light a fire under the ass of the centre (the PMO) . . . as well as the boss.”

That email is public because soon after, the government fired Rotor and Tipple, and they sued, and the feds had to cough up a lot of internal documents and emails in the process of a humiliating and richly deserved defeat at the Labour Relations Board.

Last year, the board found that Marshall treated Tipple in a “disingenuous and callous manner,” and both men were awarded big payouts.

Marshall’s next job was as high commissioner to Barbados.

Last year, before he left Canada for the next — hopefully happier — stage of his career, Rotor gave me an interview. He said his experience was “pretty horrifying.”

He was angry at Marshall, Fortier and Harper — because he was treated badly — and because they wasted his work and our money. He said Harper and Fortier let him go because they didn’t have guts, although that wasn’t the word he used.

“It was amongst the easiest work I’ve done in my career,” he said, because the system was so wasteful.

“I was hired to generate $2.5 billion over five years. At the end of the day, I think they credited the program with about $600 million. So, a $2-billion loss by removing me and killing the program.”

He said he was on track to save $1.25-billion a year. Since 2006, that’s about $6 billion.

Back then, with a new minority government full of inexperienced ministers and staffers, Harper had 99 problems, but money wasn’t one.

Today, after cutting the GST and bailing out the car companies and putting Economic Action Plan signs all over the place, the government urgently needs to cut spending.

So Treasury Board President Tony Clement is leading a committee that will cut $4 billion from the budget.

In August, the government signed a $19.8-million contract with Deloitte Inc. to give Clement a hand, which works out to $90,000 a day.

Deloitte has procurement experts — guys like Rotor — reviewing departmental cost-cutting plans before they go to Clement’s committee. I predict that they will suggest the government set up a centralized electronic procurement system, as Rotor proposed in 2006, and this time the government will do it.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.